Fulgora
Space Age expansion exclusive feature.
Fulgora is a new barren desert planet. Its surface is split between island-like plateaus, and deep oilsands. During the night, the planet is ravaged by lightning storms, damaging buildings.
Planet discovery Fulgora (research) is required to travel to the planet.
Achievements
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Visit Fulgora Travel to planet Fulgora. |
Exclusive Items
Scrap can only be found on Fulgora, in mineable scrap patches or from detritus scattered across the planet.
The following items are unlocked on Fulgora and can only be crafted on-planet:
The following items are unlocked on Fulgora but can be crafted elsewhere:
- Mech armor
- Personal battery MK3
- Energy shield MK2
- Personal roboport MK2
- Quality module 3
- Tesla turret
Surface
Properties
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Pollutant Type | None |
| Day Night Cycle | 3 Minutes |
| Magnetic Field | 99 |
| Solar Power | 20% |
| Pressure | 800 |
| Gravity | 8 |
Biomes
Fulgora is split between two distinct biomes.
- Plateaus are islands dotted around the landscape. They are the only biome where factories can be built. Some plateaus are home to alien ruins, which have fulgoran lightning attractors, which can protect your buildings until unlocking your own lightning rods. Other plateaus hold scrap, Fulgora's sole resource.
- Oilsands are the lowlands between the plateaus. No buildings can be built in them except for rail supports. You can walk through them, but occasional oilpatches will slow you to a crawl. An offshore pump can be placed on the edge of oilsands to produce an unlimited amount of heavy oil.
Terrain
Fulgoran terrain is mainly composed of oillands, on which nothing except for rail supports can be built. Traversal by foot across the oillands is possible, but slow. The oillands are further divided into deep and shallow areas, with deep areas slowing down player movement even further and not even allowing for rail supports to be built until rail support foundations (research) is researched.
However, the oillands are also scattered with islands of various sizes, on which normal construction is possible. At first, these are the only place on Fulgora where factories can be built, as foundation for building on top of the oillands requires research that can not be performed until much later.
The islands come in three size classes:
- Small islands with high amounts of resources, but with little room to build on
- Medium islands with lower amounts of resources, and with sufficient room for a small factory
- Large islands with no resources, but with enough room to build the main part of a medium-sized factory
It is possible for two or more islands to overlap, potentially creating an even larger island that does have local resources. However, most islands are detached, meaning that transport between islands will have to occur by train. In many cases, the distance between two islands is also too vast for roboports or big electric poles to reach, thus requiring local logistic and electric networks to be built, as neither roboports nor power poles can be built on the oillands without foundation.
Islands are also scattered with fulgorite, Fulgoran lightning attractors, Fulgoran ruins and Fulgoran vault ruins, allowing players without the recycler to get access to basic resources.
Mechanics
Lightning
During nighttime, dense thunderstorms occur on Fulgora, with frequent lightning strikes occurring across the surface. Lightning will strike each chunk once, every 10 seconds or so (lightnings_per_chunk_per_tick = 1 / (60 * 10), --cca once per chunk every 10 seconds (600 ticks))
If a lightning strike is set to occur near a lightning rod, lightning collector, or Fulgoran lightning attractor, then the lightning will always hit said entity, rendering the lightning harmless. However, if such an entity can not be found, the lightning will strike where it occurs, causing damage to nearby entities.
Lightning will prefer striking the entity with the highest priority, choosing randomly between entities tied for highest priority.
The duration of lightning storms is 90 seconds, spanning half the cycle (during the in game sunrise and sunset phase as well as night)
| Entity | Priority value |
|---|---|
 |
10,000 |
 |
1,000 |
| Fulgoran lightning attractor | 1,000 |
| Fulgoran vault ruin | 95 |
| Colossal Fulgoran ruin | 94 |
| Huge Fulgoran ruin | 93 |
| Big Fulgoran ruin | 92 |
| Medium Fulgoran ruin | 91 |
| Entities | Category |
|---|---|
Legacy rail    |
Rail pieces |
  |
Rail signals (notably not train stops) |
    |
Trains |
  |
Walls and mines |
   |
Trees and entities that count as a rock for filtered destruction |
Lightning rods and collectors
Lightning rods and lightning collectors serve a secondary function beyond protecting an area from lightning strikes. They convert lightning into stored power, which they quickly discharge into the local electric system. With enough accumulators to last during daytime or between lightning strikes, this can serve as the factory's main power source.
With this, lightning on Fulgora becomes both a curse and a blessing: players must keep their factory covered by lightning rods or collectors to avoid damage, and nighttime exploration becomes dangerous and risky. However, to an established base, lightning become a convenient source of electric energy, which is especially important given the weak solar output on Fulgora's surface and the difficulty of setting up a global electric network on Fulgora before foundation becomes available.
Every thunderbolt contains 1 GJ of energy, which is then extracted at the lightning rod/collectors efficiency rating (e.g. the base efficiency of a lightning rod is 20%, making the energy extracted 200 MW per bolt collected)
Natural resources
Aside from numerous items that can be collected by mining ancient ruins, only two "natural" resources occur on Fulgora, those being heavy oil and scrap.
Heavy oil can be obtained in infinite and non-diminishing amounts by placing an offshore pump on the shore of an island, allowing it to collect heavy oil directly from the oillands.
Scrap is found in deposits on small and medium sized islands, as if it were an ore. However, in stark contrast to most other natural resources, scrap is not directly processed into a single basic resource like iron or copper plates using traditional production methods. Rather, it is recycled to produce a variety of items. Players can also recycle by hand provided the recipe has been unlocked.
| Input | Output | Chance | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
 |
20% | 0.5/s |
 |
7% | 0.175/s | |
 |
6% | 0.15/s | |
 |
5% | 0.125/s | |
 |
4% | 0.1/s | |
 |
4% | 0.1/s | |
 |
4% | 0.1/s | |
 |
3% | 0.075/s | |
 |
3% | 0.075/s | |
 |
2% | 0.05/s | |
 |
1% | 0.025/s | |
 |
1% | 0.025/s |
Since this list includes intermediate products, such as processing units, but no iron or copper plates, players are generally forced to further recycle many of these items in order to obtain their ingredients. Players are thus left with the decision of what items to recycle, all while having to avoid cluttering their belts with unused resources.
Access to basic resources
- Water can be obtained from ice (from recycling scrap) via ice melting
- Stone can be obtained by recycling scrap
- Iron ore can be obtained by recycling concrete
- Iron plate can be obtained by recycling iron gear wheel, battery, or electronic circuit
- Copper plate can be obtained by recycling copper cable, battery, or low density structure
- Coal cannot be obtained and must be shipped in from other planets. However:
- Plastic bar can be obtained by recycling advanced circuit or low density structure
- There are no enemies on-planet, so explosives-based ammunition or grenades are not needed
- Crude oil is not available, but heavy oil is readily available using offshore pumps
- Copper ore is not available as the only recipe it is used in is copper plates and smelting processes cannot be reversed
- Uranium is not available eliminating nuclear power without importing from off planet
Power Considerations
Lightning Power
According to the above mechanics section, lightning strikes a chunk (defined as a 32x32 tile region) once every 10 seconds. Presumably it chooses a random tile within that section, and if a lightning rod is present in said chunk it strikes that instead. The exact mechanism is not clear, and there is also Lightning Reach modifying the selection/range, but in simple terms we can consider it this way until more detailed information is added.
Every thunderbolt contains 1 GJ of raw energy, which can then be harnessed at the stated efficiency of the lightning rod/collector (20%/40%). Both the coverage range and efficiency can be improved with quality, this will not be considered currently and will be added at a later time.
Since lightning strikes each chunk once per 10 seconds on average, that means that each chunk can generate 200/400 MJ per strike. Since the storm spans 90 seconds, that converts to 1.8/3.6 GJ per chunk per cycle. Since a cycle span 360 seconds, that converts to an averaged 5/10 MW per chunk (10/20 MW production for the active half of the cycle). For reference a theoretically ideal chunk of accumulators (so no electrical poles or anything else, just a pure 16x16 grid of accumulators) has an electrical density of 1.28 GJ (16 x 16 x 5). This means the gross production of electricity from lightning exceeds what is possible to store with base quality accumulators even with the lowest 20% efficiency.
In practice though we are assuming are factory maintains a static linear power draw during both day and night, meaning we are only trying to store half the lightning with the rest being used immediately, and possibly a little extra buffer. This means the ratio of accumulator capacity to lightning energy is actually adequate when using lightning rods.
An alternative way to view power using lightning is that each accumulator needs to store power for 180 seconds of uptime (half a cycle), meaning each accumulator at 5000 kJ effectively offers you 27.7... kW of usable power. Since every chunk offers you 5/10 MW, and each accumulator offers you 5 MJ, you effectively need 180/360 accumulators per chunk to match under ideal conditions. 180 accumulators is ~70% of the chunk's total size. This also establishes that for every 1 MW you need 36 accumulators somewhere in your factory
These calculations are theoretical and awaiting empirical confirmation
Note about drain: The lightning rods claim to have a drain of 150 MW, but this seems to work fundamentally differently to normal drain on every other electrical item. This 150 MW is not actually drained from the electrical grid as the name implies, as verified by the power panel, and its actual role in our calculations above is currently unclear
Alternative Power
The lightning mechanic offers free electricity, but this is not always adequate on its own and it may be desirable to setup auxiliary or backup power for when accumulators run low. The primary considerations or limiting factors to setting up power generation are water, and physical space due to the lack of usable land on the surface.
Using boilers with solid fuel offers 0.3 MW per unit of water, and offers an energy density of 0.05 MW per tile of surface area (36 tiles for two steam engines and a boiler).
Using a heat exchanger offers 0.97 MW per unit of water. To calculate the space efficiency as an ideal, we take the least common multiple that gives us a perfect ratio of heat exchangers to steam turbines, which is effectively 60 heat exchangers paired with 103 turbines. That gives a total area of 1905, and the 103 turbines generate 599.46 MW, meaning the ideal per tile density of energy is ~0.31468 NW, slightly better than regular boilers. This assumes ideal conditions and maximal utilization though, which is unlikely in practice. Also unlike the the boilers which produce their own heat, this setup will require additional space usage to create heat. Given the low practical likelihood of getting ideal utilization combined with the additional appendage requirement, we can declaratively say this is the less space efficient option, though it is significantly more water efficient.
Regarding heat production, heating towers offer 4.4... MW per tile, making them initially superior to nuclear at 1.6 MW per tile for a single reactor, but at scale due to the neighbor bonus nuclear can achieve higher energy density. Any reactor array larger than 1x2 will effectively achieve a higher energy density than heating towers. Using reactors will require importing fuel since its not natively available on planet. Nuclear fuel offers 400 GJ per stack or 80 GJ per rocket. Meanwhile solid fuel offers 1.5 GJ per stack with the heating tower efficiency bonus, but is extremely abundant on planet.
Solar panels do not require any water, but receive an 80% penalty on Fulgora, producing only 12 kW, or ~1.3 kW per tile. Note this is in kW, not MW. Given that fuel is abundant and space is limited and water is not impossible to acquire, this makes solar effectively worthless on Fulgora.
Water can also be imported from off planet if supply is a significant issue. A space platform can collect ice and drop it to the surface as a supplement, and if something more consistent is required water can always be transported from other planets. Transporting ice from Aquilo is significantly more efficient than the alternative of transporting water barrels offering twice the water per stack and 40 times as much per rocket. It is recommended to liquify the ice in orbit and then drop it in barrels. Electricity in orbit is free, and liquifying ice creates significantly more electrical overhead than unbarreling, which would lower net yield.
Remember for reference that lightning power has density of just ~6.94/~13.89 kW (not MW) per tile and is second to last only beating solar power. Also this number is raw energy, and does not take into consideration your ability to actually capture/store said energy. If your accumulator storage fails to fully accept any lightning while its full then your effective rate will be even lower. This calculation is based on the surface area taken by just the accumulators (180:5MW) and does not account for peripherals like power poles or the actual lightning rods themselves, which would skew the number further down slightly.
To recap:
- Heat Exchangers are ~3x more water efficient than boilers - Boilers are roughly the same if not better in terms of density - Solar panels should be avoided, effectively replaced by lightning
Optimization Tips
Fulgora has no pollution mechanic, and an overabundance of fuel. If electricity problems arise due to lack of power generation, burners are significantly more viable on Fulgora than in the base game and can help ease electrical consumption. Using burner miners, burner inserters, and steel furnaces can significantly ease electrical consumption as long as modules aren't required and throughput doesn't become an issue. This also helps use up excess solid fuel
Space routes
Fulgora is connected to 3 other planets: Nauvis, Gleba, and Aquilo.
| Planet | Distance (km) |
|---|---|
| Nauvis | 15,000 |
| Gleba | 15,000 |
| Aquilo | 30,000 |
Asteroid rate graphs:
 Space route from Nauvis to Fulgora |
 Space route from Gleba to Fulgora |
 Space route from Fulgora to Aquilo |
Graph legend:
| Asteroid type | Chunk | Medium | Big |
|---|---|---|---|
 Metallic |
● Blue | ● Red | ● Cyan |
 Carbonic |
● Orange | ● Yellow | ● Brown |
 Oxide |
● Green | ● Magenta | ● Purple |
Orbit
Properties
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Solar Power | 120% |
| Asteroid Type | Spawn Ratio |
|---|---|
| Metallic asteroid chunk | 4 |
| Carbonic asteroid chunk | 3 |
| Oxide asteroid chunk | 1 |
| Promethium asteroid chunk | 0 |
| Asteroid Size | Spawn % |
|---|---|
| Chunk | .25 |
| Medium | .25 |
| Big | 0 |
| Huge | 0 |
Note:
- Chunks spawn at Nauvis at 1.25%
- Huge Asteroids only spawn past Aquilo
Gallery
-
Example landscape of Fulgora. -
Fulgora seen on the expansion's title screen.
Trivia
- The planet's ruins suggest that an unknown civilization once existed there before the game's events.
- In mythology, Fulgora is the Roman personification of lightning, and a shieldmaiden to the god of thunder, Jupiter.
- The planet is based on real-world desert planets, as well as lightning observed on other planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
